Towards Table-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Model: A Table Structure Understanding and Text Deliberating Approach

Miao Chen, Xinjiang Lu, Tong Xu, Yanyan Li, Zhou Jingbo, Dejing Dou, Hui Xiong


Abstract
Although remarkable progress on the neural table-to-text methods has been made, the generalization issues hinder the applicability of these models due to the limited source tables. Large-scale pretrained language models sound like a promising solution to tackle such issues. However, how to effectively bridge the gap between the structured table and the text input by fully leveraging table information to fuel the pretrained model is still not well explored. Besides, another challenge of integrating the deliberation mechanism into the text-to-text pretrained model for solving the table-to-text task remains seldom studied. In this paper, to implement the table-to-text generation with pretrained language model, we propose a table structure understanding and text deliberating approach, namely TASD. To be specific, we devise a three-layered multi-head attention network to realize the table-structureaware text generation model with the help of the pretrained language model. Furthermore, a multi-pass decoder framework is adopted to enhance the capability of polishing generated text for table descriptions. The empirical studies, as well as human evaluation, on two public datasets, validate that our approach can generate faithful and fluent descriptive texts for different types of tables.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.562
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8199–8210
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.562
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.562
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Miao Chen, Xinjiang Lu, Tong Xu, Yanyan Li, Zhou Jingbo, Dejing Dou, and Hui Xiong. 2022. Towards Table-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Model: A Table Structure Understanding and Text Deliberating Approach. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8199–8210, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Table-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Model: A Table Structure Understanding and Text Deliberating Approach (Chen et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.562.pdf